


Pareidolia

by draculard



Category: Ravenous (1999)
Genre: Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Frostbite, Huddling For Warmth, M/M, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-13
Updated: 2019-03-13
Packaged: 2019-11-17 14:02:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,381
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18099950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: When everyone else is dead, Ives and Boyd set off through the woods, southbound toward civilization.





	Pareidolia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [roguefaerie (samidha)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/samidha/gifts).



There was nothing but evergreen wood all around them, and it oozed a grey smudge of smoke over the air and snow. The fire didn’t crackle so much as it puffed and smoldered, burning almost invisibly inside the pine logs, like a hemorrhage. Sap bubbled and fell away from the flames in globs, only to harden in the ashes.

Boyd stared into the fire until his eyes lost focus. He kept his hands pinned under his arms, but his body wasn’t giving off much heat, and the force from the fire itself was underwhelmingly, painfully weak. He was stiff all over in a way that reminded him of childhood — flying down hills in his brother’s wooden toboggan; the chill impact of a snowball against his neck, melting down his back; the raw, scraped feeling of his fingers, turning red from cold. With age, these experiences had tipped the scale from pleasant pain to sheer irritation.

His current company probably had something to do with that.

“Is the cowardice of a man who plays dead in battle really so different from the shame of a tuberculosis patient?” Ives asked from his seat by the fire. Boyd didn’t believe his innocent tone for a second; he could see the crooked smile winding its way over Ives’s lips, under his snow-encrusted beard. “Both are ailments of the spirit, if society is to be believed. Both can be cured with a little--”

“Stop,” said Boyd, his voice harsh. He stood and paced away from the fire, stomping through the snow. In the back of his mind, he knew he was allowing Ives to goad him, and knew that would only encourage Ives to do worse. But the blasted murderer had been quiet all day, and it had lulled Boyd into a false sense of security — he’d almost convinced himself he could bear this journey, could find peace with his companion.

With his back to Ives, he stood in the gloom underneath a tall fir tree, his arms crossed, his chest heaving. He glared into the night, unable to think straight.

Behind him, Ives laughed.

“The White Plague,” he said, and then let out another breathless chuckle. “That’s me. What would they call your ailment, John? The Yellow Plague, do you think?”

“Don’t call me John,” said Boyd. His hands curled into fists. “We are not friends, Ives.”

“Friends, no,” said Ives amicably. Boyd could hear him adding fistfuls of dry pine needles to the fire. He looked over his shoulder and saw Ives arranging the firewood one-handed, with no concern for his fingers; the flames grew, their color now bright and healthy. Sparks popped and flew in Ives’s face, but he did not flinch. Before Boyd could look away, Ives glanced up and caught Boyd’s eyes with his own, glittering like a smile. “Companions, yes,” said Ives. “Like it or not.”

Huddled under the fir trees, Boyd closed his eyes and let the howling wind whisk his consciousness away. If he stopped listening to Ives, he could practically feel the warmth of a fire at Fort Spencer — he could hear Hart’s laugh, smell the fried potato skins he’d made one Saturday night.

But he lingered in his imagination for too long, and soon there was something shuffling toward him over white dust. An emaciated creature, dessicated skin the color of ash pulled tight over its bones. It pulled itself forward on its belly, blackened hands forming claws against the ground. When it turned its face up to Boyd, he saw the yellowed eyes sunk deep in its skull, the suppurated lips, heard the groan dislodging from deep in its throat.

It brought with it a strange but familiar odor, one that had been rooted in Boyd’s memory since that summer in Mexico. Death, corruption, decomposition, decay. The smell of dried blood and uncleaned wounds.

Boyd opened his eyes again.

There was no one in the clearing — just he and Ives.

* * *

At night, after a long day of hiking, Boyd could block out the sounds of creaking tree branches and roosting owls and summon up the long-lost song of his mother’s violin. She played a tune for spring that he remembered to this day, when all her other inventions had been forgotten. It was light and airy, notes dancing over a chill spring wind, warmth and coldness intermingling.

But with the frozen ground bleeding through the bottom of the tent, it was difficult for Boyd to reproduce every note. Parts of the composition fell flat and others repeated, over and over again in his head, until he couldn’t be sure they were right anymore.

“Southbound,” Ives said in the darkness of their tent. His voice cut through the music in Boyd’s head. “Southbound toward civilization.”

Boyd stared up at the canvas of the tent, so low-slung it brushed his nose. He tried to pull the music back to him, but it evaded his grasp neatly, the notes suddenly inaudible and far away. He lay in a nest of animal furs, the same furs he’d wrapped Ives in when he first arrived at Fort Spencer, frostbitten and delirious. How much of that had been a clever act, designed to trick them, to make them feel protective over a man who would one day be their doom? Instinct told Boyd that every second of it had been real, but his instincts had been proven wrong more than once.

Beside him, Ives lifted the furs and lay down heavily, his arm striking against the frozen ground. He pulled close to Boyd; he gave off a feverish heat despite his small stature, his slender form.

“Civilization,” Ives murmured, talking to himself. He shivered uncontrollably; the cold affected him more than Boyd somehow. It was part of him, frozen to his bones. “People.”

Boyd squeezed his eyes shut. It was necessary to share his tent with Ives, if only for the body heat, to ward off death. Outside, it was too cold to snow, but ice followed them everywhere, slicking the bark of trees and lying in a crunchy layer over the ground. Death would come swiftly for a man on his own.

Ives had a persistent smell about him — a smell of burnt wood, fresh earth, blood. It invaded the tent each night, harassed Boyd’s dreams.

“Fresh flesh,” Ives said, a smile in his voice. He put a hand on Boyd’s arm, shook him slightly, as if urging Boyd to understand some hidden joke.

* * *

There was a red sore on the side of Boyd’s index finger — he noticed it the next morning, when the sun was bright against the snow and he and Ives had set off from camp. A chilblain, bigger than any he’d ever had. It didn’t itch, but it ached when he rubbed at it, or when it caught against the fabric of his gloves. He did his best to ignore it, but without fail, he’d find himself absentmindedly touching it, worrying at it, seeking out the mild pain when he was hungry (which was always) or tired (which was always) or cold.

“It’ll turn to frostbite,” Ives said. Boyd jumped and straightened his shoulders, stuffing his hand in his pocket. He hurried forward a few steps, which didn’t do much to help his sense of hurt dignity — it was difficult to flounce away wearing snowshoes. By the time he took his third high step he just felt silly. Ives caught up quickly; he was more natural on the snowshoes than Boyd was, and didn’t quite look as though he were floundering up an invisible set of stairs.

“I’d know,” Ives said, drawing close. He shuffled around to Boyd’s left side and stood close. Their breath mingled into one visible cloud of fog. “Here.”

He pulled off his damp wool gloves and held his fingers to the light. They were pale and waxen where Boyd’s were an angry red from the cold, but as Ives rotated his wrists, he pointed out small spots of dull, dark blue on his skin.

“Frostbite,” Boyd breathed.

“Touch it,” Ives said. “Doesn’t hurt — anymore.”

Boyd shook his head, but Ives grabbed his wrist and brought Boyd’s hand to his. Reluctantly, Boyd laid his fingers against the dark spots; they felt no different than any other part of Ives’s body. No harder than the rest of his skin, no more stiff than a regular bruise.

“Watch this,” Ives said. He curled his hand into a tight fist, bringing out the lines of his fingers in sharp relief. But there were no wrinkles present over the dark spots; those remained placid and smooth. It was like throwing a rock into a lake and watching the water ripple, while one small circle in the middle stayed eerily undisturbed.

Boyd shuddered and pulled away.

“It’s dead,” Ives said matter-of-factly, pulling his glove back on. “Doesn’t move at all. But I trust it’ll heal before long, when we get warm again.”

Boyd bit his tongue against a wave of pessimism that threatened to swell right out of his mouth. He adjusted the straps of his bag so they didn’t bite into his shoulders so painfully — and to give himself something to do, something other than looking at Ives.

“When did you get frostbite?” he asked, voice low. He’d only had his chilblain for a day.

“Before,” said Ives vaguely. Boyd didn’t respond, and Ives seemed to sense his answer wasn’t good enough without being told. “Since I led my party into the mountains, after the first snow.”

“It hasn’t healed?” Boyd said. His mouth twisted and before he could stop himself, he spat, “Like your fucking tuberculosis did?”

“It heals,” said Ives mildly. He squinted against the bright winter sun; his eyes were wreathed in lines beyond his age — laugh lines, Boyd suspected, which rankled him horribly — and in daylight, the color looked almost washed out, like a watercolor brown. “It heals, it comes back, it heals again,” said Ives. “On my fingers, on my toes. Ever since I was a child. So don’t worry about your chilblain.”

“I’ve had chilblains before,” said Boyd, rolling his eyes. This was true — but he’d never had them in the wild, miles from shelter, when the ground was packed with snow and there was no guarantee he’d see summer again. He felt his earlier dismissal, which came so easily, turn bitter in his mouth, and he swallowed it down. Soon he found himself staring at his feet instead of up toward the horizon.

For a long time, he and Ives walked in silence, with only the swishing sound of their snowshoes and the occasional crack of a tree branch to accompany them. The whistling of the wind launched an assault against Boyd’s ears, deafening him at the same time it turned his nerve endings to ice. He cupped his hands over his mouth and breathed into them, then tried to rub the warmth onto his ears — but by the time he reached the side of his head, all warmth had faded away.

“I made snowshoes,” Ives said suddenly; Boyd jumped. “Twelve pairs, including my own. I used ash from the forest — lucky we had it, best for bending, and good for burning, too — and rawhide from the oxen, which we could have eaten. Amazing, really, how fond they all were of me, especially after that. I led them straight down the wrong path, through Hastings Cutoff, and instead of blaming me, they turned on each other. Bayliss Wilson, especially — oh, he got the blame for everything that went wrong.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” said Boyd. He rubbed at his ears again to no avail. With clumsy, wool-covered fingers, he undid the leather laces at the top of his trapper hat. The flaps flopped down to the side of his head and he briefly felt the tickle of fur against the shell of his ears — but the flaps did nothing to help him in the end. The wind picked them up and swept them away from his head entirely; he was better off keeping them up.

“In the end, Bayliss went mad from hypothermia,” said Ives. “He stripped his clothes off and disappeared into the woods. Malnourished, but not without value, if you know what I mean. I found his body in the snow. Look at it from their point of view — I’d made them snowshoes, so they could venture out from camp, find a way home. They had no way of knowing it was futile. And then, not a day later, I return with a source of food. Of course, they’d look the other way. Everyone knows the taste of venison, the twist of sinews from a slaughtered buck — they knew Bayliss was gone and they knew what I brought back. And they ate it anyway.”

Boyd grit his teeth. He dragged his eyes up from his snowbound feet and squinted at the sun instead. He could pretend not to hear Ives, concentrating so hard on the light filtering through the pine needles that the other man’s voice simply faded into the background.

He could pretend.

“Orchestrated madness,” said Ives, savoring the words. “Not a single one of them knew the territory. They were utterly dependent on me, their beloved guide. Wasting away, freezing to death — never enough protein to supply energy for the long hike out. I led _three_ expeditions out of camp, did you know?”

Boyd said nothing.

“Three,” said Ives again. He picked at the fraying fabric of his gloves as he walked, back bent a little from the weight of his pack. “Eight men, two women, two children, all of us stupid from hunger and too weak to stand. All of them sure I’d find a way out.”

Was there a hint of guilt in Ives’s voice? Boyd squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated on the low tones coming from the other man, but he couldn’t connect any emotion with his words. There was only a detached sort of satisfaction — and when Boyd kept his eyes closed too long, and listened too closely, Ives’s voice started to sound like an inverse twin to his mother’s song of spring.

“Jarring, isn’t it?” said Ives, voice flat. Boyd opened his eyes and found himself gasping for breath; they’d stopped walking in the middle of a clearing, surrounded on all sides by trees, and Boyd’s clothes were sticking to him from sweat. Ives was rolling his shoulders, trying to ease away the weight of his pack. “Like the feeling when another man’s bullet drives straight to your bones,” he said.

Boyd didn’t reply. He was aware of Ives eyeing him. He tried to remember what Ives had said last, how they’d gotten to this point, but the effort sent a spike of pain straight through his skull.

“Then again, you wouldn’t know, would you,” Ives mused. “Uninjured in battle as you were.”

“Stuff it, Ives,” said Boyd. He was unable to channel the unsettled rage he felt into his voice; his words came out sounding weak and almost unbothered. “You hold one battle over my head for lack of anything better. _One_ moment when I hid to save my own skin, when fighting would have helped no one.” Wearily, he slid his pack from his shoulders; it sunk deep into the snow and he immediately felt lighter, so weightless he could almost fly. “You spent _months_ wasting away and going mad from starvation just like everyone else in your party, and you act like you were some grand chessmaster leading them to their demise. When you were _one of them_. Call me a coward — why don’t you examine your own shortcomings for once?”

It was silent in the clearing. Boyd’s breath hovered in the air before him, absorbing the frost on the trees.

“Better a cannibal than a coward,” Ives said lightly, but his eyes were glinting.

“Better a coward than a cannibal,” said Boyd firmly, but his mouth was dry.

* * *

The buffalo calf was half-formed. Its head was too big for its body, one eye larger than the other, bulbous and pulsating from infection. It stumbled on wasted legs, abandoned by its mother, by its entire herd.

Ives scoffed at the sight of it, but then he cast a peculiar glance on Boyd, his lips thin and his eyes contemplative.

“What?” Boyd snapped. Ives shrugged one thin shoulder, looking away.

“Shall we eat it?” he asked. Boyd stared at him.

“It’s diseased.”

Ives gave him a biting smile, his teeth flashing underneath his beard. “Aye, so are we,” he said.

Disgusted, Boyd turned away. He avoided the calf, walking in wide circles around it to get back to the woods. He pretended he was searching for kindling, but really he could barely think. The calf moaned — an inhuman sound that curled up against the coils in Boyd’s brain.

His fists were clenched. He turned back to Ives, jerked his head toward the calf. His stomach was empty and it called to him, singing with desire.

Flesh.

Blood.

“Kill it,” said Boyd. He didn’t look at the calf; he could not look at the calf. Ives took a jaunty step forward and pulled a hunting knife from his belt with a grace and ease which set Boyd’s teeth on edge. Despite himself, the sight of Ives and his knife always sent Boyd into fight-or-flight. He felt himself trembling and tamped down on it, and as it stopped, he was overcome with a wave of nonsensical rage.

“ _Kill it!_ ” he screamed, spit flying from his mouth. It didn’t matter that Ives already was; the calf’s blood had stained the ground, melting any snow it touched. His knife was buried in its neck, his knuckles consumed by rent flesh and gore-soaked fur.

Ives did not acknowledge Boyd’s scream.

* * *

Boyd roasted the calf’s flank over a fire. Behind him, Ives set about drying and salting the rest of the meat — he seemed optimistic that the two of them would be able to carry the leftovers with them until it ran out. Boyd wasn’t so sure; small as it was, the calf proved difficult to transport back to camp, even with he and Ives lifting together.

Blood had dripped from the calf’s severed neck onto Ives’s shoulder. His shirt was dark from it, sticking to his skin — but if he noticed, he didn’t care.

Boyd glanced at him once, furtively, and then turned back to the fire. Had Ives salted the corpses of his party like this? Flayed the meat from their bones, preserved it as long as he could, cooked it, even — over a fire or in a stew? All this time, Boyd had imagined Ives tearing flesh from bone with his teeth, consuming his victims raw like a wild animal. Now, that fantasy seemed incongruent, but so did the image of Ives cooking and preserving his victims.

Neither fit. Thinking about it gave Boyd a headache, which he attributed to anything else — hunger, dehydration, exhaustion. He grabbed a handful of snow from the ground next to him and shovelled it into his mouth absently — and of course, Ives turned his eyes to Boyd right at that moment, and caught him eating the snow.

“Ought to boil it first,” said Ives. Boyd snorted almost inaudibly and wrapped his arms around his knees. He closed his eyes, listening to the fire as it crackled against the calf’s flank.

“Eat a diseased calf, why not?” Boyd said. “But God forbid I put a handful of clean snow in my mouth when I’m thirsty. Do you hear yourself?”

He could almost hear Ives shrugging. There was a light crunching noise behind him as Ives walked across the snow, the calf’s stripped bones clattering together in his arms, its pelt stretched over a flat rock. Distantly, through the muffling effect of the fir trees, Boyd heard Ives chuck the bones down a ravine in the woods. He came back slowly, and it occurred to Boyd for the first time that Ives must be as weary as he was, after such an arduous trek.

He relished that information for as long as he could, until Ives sat down on the log next to Boyd, and his momentary satisfaction gave way to the usual disgruntlement. Ives stretched his feet out; his boots were falling apart now, tied together with bits of twine, and he caught Boyd looking at them and waggled his brows.

“Winter,” said Ives, smiling. “Coldness. Famine. Starvation.”

Unsettled, Boyd looked away. The calf’s flank was roasting damnably slow.

“You think we’ll survive the winter?” asked Ives lightly. It seemed a legitimate question, but Boyd didn’t answer. “I’ve never seen spring,” Ives said. “I was born in December, did you know that? On the last day of fall, one minute before the solstice.”

Boyd suppressed a scoff. “Don’t tell me any tall tales,” he said. “I’m not in the mood.”

Ives took no offense. He touched the roasting meat with a bare hand, without flinching, and kept his hand there, flat against the hot flesh, long enough to unnerve Boyd. He reached out on impulse and grabbed Ives’s wrist, pulling his hand away. Without letting go, he examined Ives’s fingers for burns, but there was no sign of any, and before he could investigate further, Ives had wrestled his hand away and crossed his arms tightly across his chest for warmth.

“The _wìdjigò_ is a creature of snow,” said Ives, staring into the fire. “It comes into this world frostbitten, malnourished. Purple bruises on its hands and feet.”

Disgusted, Boyd stood and abandoned the fire. He started to turn northward, to walk into the trees, but then he saw the pool of congealed blood where Ives dissected the calf and changed his mind. He walked south, hearing the clatter of the calf’s bones in his mind.

“It doesn’t see spring,” Ives said, his voice carrying with the icy wind. “Doesn’t see summer. I’ve never been warm, John. Have you?”

Boyd turned again, facing a distant mountain range. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Ives sitting calmly at the fire.

“Yes,” Boyd said, his voice a whisper. “I’ve been warm. I’ve seen summer.”

Ives said nothing.

“I spent summers swimming in the river as a boy,” Boyd said. “It was June when my father died. It was July and hot as the fires of hell when I fought in the war.”

He gave Ives a challenging look, but Ives’s expression was unreadable, and he only shrugged. Somehow, he gave off a wounded air, as though he truly expected Boyd to say “No, Ives, I’ve never experienced summer in my life.” Ives turned his head slowly back to the fire and Boyd deflated a little; he realized he was hoping for a fight and felt disappointed in himself, though his fists were still clenched.

He was about to continue his walk when Ives said, “Was it summer all the time, when you fought in the war? Or only when you hid?”

Boyd’s jaw tightened; he could feel his teeth aching where they met the gums. He took two steps forward, his legs stiff from cold, and then stopped himself.

“It was July when I enlisted,” he hissed. “It was August when I first saw battle. It was May of the next year when my commanding officer dropped in front of me, dead by cholera. It was June the year after that when I was promoted, and it was July again when I _hid_ , and July when I captured the Mexican headquarters. Does that satisfy you?”

Ives only gave him a wry smile, and that spurred Boyd on. He stalked across the snow and stood by the fire, looming over Ives. The smell of roasting beef nearly overwhelmed him and for a moment he was faint and sore and unsteady on his feet — but Ives was staring up at him, still smirking, looking so thin that Boyd could snap him in two.

And he desperately wanted to, Boyd realized. There were bruises on Ives’s protruding collarbones, visible through the neck of his shirt, and Boyd felt a rush of envy at whatever caused them — the cold, a snapping tree branch, the weight of the calf, or night after night of sleeping on the frozen ground. Whatever it was, Boyd wished it had been his own hands to taint Ives’s skin, to burst his blood vessels, to make him ache.

“You’re delusional,” Boyd said softly, and Ives’s smile grew wider. His eyes turned back to the fire, like Boyd wasn’t interesting enough to watch. “You really believe this, don’t you? That you’re some craven spirit, that destruction is necessary to your existence — or even _desirable_ —”

“I believe only what I’ve experienced,” said Ives. And God damn him, but he sounded amused. He reached out and turned the flank to roast the other side; his fingers were long and thin, the skin pale, like his flesh had melted away. “I was born in the snow and I’ll die in the snow. I’ve been starving all my life.”

Boyd’s ragged fingernails were biting half-moons into his palms. The wind had iced him over, freezing his hands into fists. It was a long time before he could move, and then he couldn’t figure out whether to sit down or walk away — walk south over the mountain range, south toward the sea, toward civilization, cities, men and women and children. A world of normalcy, of beef cuts taken from robust cattle, of jam preserves and meals cooked on stove-tops or in little restaurants, beds carved of oak, pillows stuffed with pine needles. A world where people weren’t soldiers or killers; where they greeted one another on the street and shook hands, and a man Boyd’s age could expect, within reason, to marry a woman, to settle down, to raise a child. A world where his stomach was full, where this damned hunger wasn’t crawling through his skin, as thoroughly inescapable as the winter wind.

A world without Ives.

The calf roasted, and Boyd couldn’t seem to catch Ives’s eyes. He could see only his beard, the snowflakes in his hair, the starved, stark lines of his shoulders and back.

With a shallow sigh, Boyd returned to the fireside and took his seat on the old, frozen log.

 


End file.
